WASHINGTON, D.C.– The Department of Justice announced today that a
federal immigration court in Manhattan has ordered the deportation of an
Ellenville, N.Y., man to Ukraine because he had participated in the
persecution of Jewish civilians during World War II. He had served as an armed
guard at two SS slave-labor camps in Nazi occupied Poland. The court's order
follows a July 2001 decision by a federal court in Syracuse to revoke the
defendant's U.S. citizenship based on his Nazi guard service.

U.S. Immigration Judge Mirlande Tadal ordered that Mykola Wasylyk, 79, be
deported from the United States because he had served as an armed guard at the
Trawniki and Budzyn forced labor camps in Nazi-occupied Poland from April 1943
to November 1943.

In a written decision, Judge Tadal explained that the purpose of the Trawniki
and Budzyn camps "was to warehouse, incarcerate, exploit and kill Jewish
persons" because of their Jewish heritage. The judge added that prisoners in
the two camps "were subjected to inhumane treatment, including physical abuse
and death." While serving as an armed guard, the court concluded, Wasylyk's
assignment was to patrol the perimeters of both camps to ensure that no one
escaped.

"The court's ruling reaffirms that the guards at Nazi slave labor camps were
not simply unthinking cogs in a killing machine – they were active, vital
participants in the Nazi scheme to exterminate millions of innocent people,"
said Michael Chertoff, Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Criminal
Division.

"Armed guards like Wasylyk ensured that Jews and other prisoners could not
escape the starvation, disease, overwork, and murder to which they were
subjected on a daily basis in the Nazi camps," said Eli M. Rosenbaum, Director
of the Office of Special Investigations (OSI), which brought the case on
behalf of the Justice Department.

OSI initiated the deportation action against Wasylyk in December 2001 after a
federal court had revoked Wasylyk's naturalized U.S. citizenship because of
his wartime service as a Nazi camp guard. Wasylyk, a native of what is now
Ukraine, entered the United States in 1949 using a visa he obtained in
Germany. In her decision, the immigration judge noted that Wasylyk regards
himself as a Ukrainian national; she ordered that he be deported to Ukraine.

The proceedings to deport Wasylyk are a result of OSI's ongoing efforts to
identify and take legal action against former participants in Nazi persecution
residing in this country. Since 1979, 71 Nazi persecutors have been stripped
of their U.S. citizenship and 57 have been removed from the country as a
result of OSI operations. Also, 165 suspected Nazi persecutors have been
prevented from entering the U.S. under OSI's "Watch List" border control
program.